Why is Israel fertile?

Trickle down natalism

It’s quite well known by now that, unique among economically developed countries, Israel’s TFR is robustly above replacement levels and shows no signs of dropping. Low and declining fertility across non-s**thole countries is a serious problem, threatening, at a minimum, chronic pension crises, and, in the most extreme cases, the actual extinction of entire nations. Understanding how Israel has managed to combine a stable TFR of 3-ish with a functioning sewage system is probably one of the more important issues for pundits thinking about the medium to long term to figure it out.

Lucky for you, I’ve cracked it, but first it’s necessary to get some red herrings out of the way. Israel’s TFR isn’t high because it’s just so darned nationalist. Ukraine and Russia are also pretty nationalist, so nationalist that, together, they have sent over half a million young men to die over something called a ‘Donbass’, and their TFRs look like this:

There are other examples too. Azerbaijan is pretty nationalist; they just expelled over 100,000 Armenians on the more or less explicit grounds that they consider them subhuman, and they have indicated they are up for annexing and expelling some more. It’s not clear who they intend to settle on their extra territory, though, because their TFR looks like this:

Another blind alley is that Israel breeds so much because it is a very religious country, practically a theocracy. Well, Iran is actually a theocracy, so how are they doing?

Oh dear. Maybe that’s a Shia thing though - too busy beating themselves with chains or whatever weird stuff it is they do to have babies. Maybe the Sunni theocracies are more robustly fertile?

Nope

Another idea we need to jettison is that Israel has a high TFR as a result of an integrated natalist government policy. It isn’t that Israel has no pro-fertility policies, it’s just that other countries do too, and they don’t work all that well. Hungary has thrown the kitchen sink at the problem, between 2011 and 2016 it raised TFR from 1.23 to 1.53, which is certainly a good start but since then it has plateaued. Experience from other countries tallies. Maybe if it dumped all the tax incentives and subsidised fertility treatments, Israel would go down from 3 to 2.7, but this is not the big story here.

There are also various ideas from pundits I generally agree with that don’t fit with the Israeli story. A lot of well-meaning American writers fret about ‘Affordable Family Formation’, which is basically about how easy it is for young people to couple up, find stable well-paying jobs, and buy or rent child-appropriate housing in safe neighbourhoods. Affordable Family Formation is a good thing, but Israel is an extremely crowded country, and the Bank of Israel has deliberately stoked house-price inflation since 2008. The average young couple live in a badly-furnished flat on the fifth floor of a modernist monstrosity in a new-build neighbourhood drawn up by town planners whose modus operandi appears to be watching YouTube videos on good urbanism and then just doing the exact opposite.

Others who I am in sympathy with write a lot about environmental fertility depressants in modern life, but, again, Israel doesn’t bear them out. Everyone here eats soy oil, everyone keeps their phone in their pocket, everyone wears plastic clothes and eats hot food off plastic plates. Environmental protections have been worn down to nothing by successive L**ud governments. Whether your pet issue is phytoestrogens or microplastics, Israelis aren’t listening, they are too busy breaking up fights and clearing up sick. Their sprogs might emerge from the birth canal congenitally brain damaged, maybe even a bit wonky looking, but emerge they do.

Finally, Right Wing Futurism and some others contend that, once contraception is widespread and women achieve some basic level of legal and practical equality, TFR is a function principally of genetic predisposition to want to marry and have kids, and is culture and institutions invariant. Apparently not, because Jewish TFR in America is below replacement, even with the Orthodox bumping up the numbers.¹

Socially Recursive Fertility

Before explaining what is actually going on in Israel, we need to agree on a basic model of why people choose or don’t choose to reproduce at different rates over time. For this, I recommend a documentary called Birthgap, which is a bit normie, but articulates a strong case with two main planks.

The first is that declining fertility across the developed world is not principally, and perhaps not even at all, a consequence of smaller family sizes, but of a large and growing proportion of the population having no children at all. This infertility is to some extent involuntary because the majority of women who ended up childless did plan on having children, but left it too late, underestimating both the difficulty of pairing up, and the difficulty of conceiving when you hit 35. The obvious conclusion is that you must right now start spamming 28-year-old career gahls living their best life with empty egg box gifs, though don’t be stupid - get a VPN first.

More relevant for us now, however, is the second observation, which is that fertility in a post-contraceptive world is basically mimetic, which is a ponce way of saying that people decide to have x number of kids based on looking around at how many kids the people around them have, who in turn have that many because they looked around at how many kids the people around them were having. However, if fertility rates are recursive in this way, how can they change? The answer is that some event happens which causes large numbers of couples to delay their procreation until things settle down. These events, such as the 1973 oil price spike, the 2008 depression, or ‘Covid’, are, in the eyes of these couples, a temporary delay to their family planning. However, what happens is that everyone then looks around at how many children people are now having and copies each other, fixing in the new low fertility plateau until the next crisis when it drops again. There are some countries like South Korea with unusually toxic and bizarre cultures where fertility just keeps spiralling downwards, but usually it looks like the pattern above: a sharp drop and then a levelling off at below-replacement levels.

So what’s up with the Zionist entity?

The first piece of our puzzle is the charedim (ultra-orthodox Jews for uncool people who don’t know the lingo). Charedim in Israel have very high fertility rates, but this requires no special explanation, or, to be more precise, it requires no special Israeli explanation. Charedim have high birth rates in America, and Canada, and Britain, and Belgium and everywhere else they happen to be. Why exactly this is the case needn’t detain us here, but the bottom line is that it’s a culture set up first, last and everything in between for breeding. Imagine every difficulty you’ve ever had with having children, every reason you can think of for not popping out one more; Charedi society has an app for that.

The important point here is that everywhere except Israel that’s where it ends. Plenty of people in New York State witness large Charedi families hogging the sidewalk, but it doesn’t influence them to have more children in imitation because charedim are too alien from them to help determine their conception of what is normal.

The key difference is that, in Israel, there are wannabe Charedi communities who are influenced by Charedim, from whom they draw religious inspiration. These fall into two main categories. The first are Religious Zionists looking for something a little more intellectually and spiritually elevated than what mainstream religious Zionism has to offer. This used to be focussed around somewhat maverick Charedi Rabbis like Rav Zalman Nehemia Goldberg זצ’’ל or Rav Nebenzahl שליט’’א, whereas it’s now mostly a Chassidic thing. The other group are Shasnikim, religious Sephardim who want to take it to the hoop and be Charedi, but aren’t quite capable of pulling it off for whatever reason, though they may try to push their children up a rung.

What these groups do is provide a one-way channel of influence between Israeli Charedim and the rest of Charedi society, a sort of valve in which Charedi fertility memes can spread outwards, without allowing fertility decreasing memes inwards. Charedim, dropouts aside, sustain minimal influence from orbiter communities, upon whom they look at best with pity, but these orbiter groups are greatly influenced by them. Even the most fervently religious Religious Zionist, though, is still very much embedded in a wider Religious Zionist world upon whom his elevated fertility rubs off. Around 25% of the Religious Zionist community is actually barely religious at all and very comfortable freely mixing with ‘traditional’ Israelis who don’t keep the Sabbath, but ‘respect’ it (this mixing is actively encouraged by the Religious Zionist rabbinate who for complicated theological reasons need to bump up the numbers of Israeli Jews who count as being religious so they can sleep at night). Finally, these traditional Jews mingle with secular Jews, who pick up the last scraps of the Charedi fertility meme, enough to keep their demographic head above water.

The basic model here is that, unlike anywhere else in the world, there is no hard cultural barrier (at least in one direction) between Charedim and the rest of society, and enough mimetic stepping stones that almost everyone is influenced to some degree. A very simplified model looks like this:

Substack has no table function. Not good!

Of course, this is very simplistic and stylised as a model. In real life, the channels of mimetic-fertility transmission are multiple, and can be longer or shorter. Think of it like the diagrams of stages in production in Austrian Business Cycle Theory (oh, that reference doesn’t make it clearer? Smarten up bucko, we covered this in 2008).

Takeaways for gentiles?

Is there anything the nations can learn from this to stop their societies falling apart? Well, some countries do have breeder populations somewhat analogous to Charedim, like the Amish or Laestadians. As with Charedim, these communities are mimetically separate from wider society, and necessarily so, otherwise they would be flooded by the wider culture and their fertility would collapse. If you want to mimic Israel, though, what you could do is set up is a new denomination called National Amishism, which is exactly like normal Amish except its adherents wear shabby casual clothes and are convinced that true Amish theology necessitates joining the U.S. army (this is going to take some pretty elaborate word-juggling, but maybe we Jews can help you out with that, we’re good at it). Then, the more devoted members of National Amishism would, realising how lame their movement was, try to suck up as much to real Amish as possible and, if the real Amish humour them just enough, can act as a conduit for Amish fertility to percolate throughout American society.

But perhaps that sounds outlandish. What may not be quite so outlandish, though, is to set up high-fertility communities that are so cool those around them aspire to get close, but also have enough conviction in their own right to coolness that they never let the orbiters get close enough to influence them. Maybe, when Walt gets bored scamming fagcorps, he might set one up.

1. On this score, we should briefly mention that is absolutely not true, as some claim, that Israeli TFR is entirely a result of the Orthodox. Even completely secular Jews hover around 2, and ‘traditional’ Jews are around 2.5. There are fears that secular fertility is on course to dip negative. If that’s true it may be because secular Israelis are radicalising to an extent that they are no longer influenced by traditional Israelis.